Archive for the ‘Business Management’ Category

Those who are employed in the realm of Social or Internet Marketing definitely have to know the existence of at least 4 different conditional stereotypes, these are Baby Boomers and Generation X, Generation Y and Generation Z (Millenials).

According to Socielogist Karl Mannheim (who is among the founding fathers of classical socielogy) – "All members of a generation share a similar collective experience" or in other words people are categorized in generations depending on when they were born.

As stereotypes they're generalization of people born in different periods of time and sharing same or similar traits.
Because of the age and the conditions they grew up and as they share those general spirit of time and age, they tend to be more or less behaving in a similar ways in how they think save / spend money or share some common approach to life choices and attitude towards life and worldview.

But before proceeding to the 4 main cohert provisional stereotypes, its worthy to mention how these four common trait generations came to existence with a little bit of pre-history.

The pre WW I and WW II world situation and the First and Second World War played a pivotal role in forming the social conditions necessery for the development of the baby boomers.

* The depression Era people

Born in period: 1912 – 1921 who came at full maturity around 1930-1939 right in the beginning of WW I (all of whom are already deceased) as of 2018 as a cause of the war uncertainty and the havoc and the war conditions were very conservative, compulsive savers, tried their best to maintain a low debt. They had the mindset (responsibility) to leave some kind of legacy to their children. They were very patriotic, oriented towards work before pleasure, had a great respect for authority and had a strong sense of moral obligation. For all this character traits of this people undoubtfully a key role played the strong belief in God mostly all people had at the time.

The next in line conditional stereotype of people that came to earth are the:

* The World War II Generation

Born in year period: 1922 to 1927 who came to a mature age exactly at the terrible years of Second World War.

People of that time were either fighters for or against the Axis Powers or the Central Powers with the common shared goal to fight against the enemy (of course there are multiple of people who were just trying to survive and not taking a side in this meaningless war).

The current amount of people living are estimated to few million of deathbed elders worldwide.

As above conditional generations types mentioned are of importance for historical reasons and most of the people belonging to those depression pre WWI and WW II era are dead or just a few millions an overall in un less-consuming age (excluding the medicine consumption which is higher compared to youngsters).

I'll further proceed further with the Baby Boomers, GEN X, Y, Zs who are de-facto the still active members participating to society and economy more or less.

So what are these 4 Stereotypes of Generations that and why are so important for the modern marketers or business manager?

1. BABY BOOMERS also called for a short (Boomers)

These are people who have been defined by a birth year range (period) from early to mid 1940s until 1960 and 1964.

In Europe and North America, boomers are widely identified with privilege, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in post-war housing and education, and increasing affluence.

As a group, baby boomers were considered the wealthiest, most active, and most physically fit generation up to the era in which they arrived, and were amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. They were also the generation that received peak levels of income; they could therefore reap the benefits of abundant levels of food, apparel, retirement programs, and sometimes even "midlife crisis" products. The increased consumerism for this generation has been regularly criticized as excessive (and that's for a good reason).

One feature of the boomers was that they have tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before or that has come afterward. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the changes they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and with a methapors such as as "the pig in the python".

2. Generation X / GEN X

Generation X is considered the people born in the following birth year period 1960 forward in time until 1980s. A specific feature in the 60s-80s period was the shifting societal values, perhaps the spring of this generation was also connected to the increasing role and spread of communism in the world.
Sometimes this generation was referred as the "latchkey generation".
The term generation X itself was popularized largely by Douglas Coupland in his novel 1991 novel Generation X Tales for an Accelerated Culture

A very common trait for Generation X was the reduced adult supervision over kids when compared to previous generations a result of increasing divorce rates and the increased role of one parent children upbringing (in most cases that was the mother) which had to be actively involved as a workforce and lacked physically the time to spend enough time with its children and the increased use of childcare options in one parent families.

They were dubbed the "MTV" (Music Television) generation – that was a hit and most popular music TV in the early 1990s.
The kids representing generation X were described as slackers, cynical and disaffected.

The cultural influences dominating the tastes and feelings of the teen masses of that generation was musical genres such as punk music, heavy metal music, grunge and hip-hop and indie films (independent films) produced outside of the major film studio system.

According to many researches in midtime those generation are described as active, happy and achieving a work-life balance kind of lifestyle.

People belonging to Generation X are described as people with Enterpreneural tendencies.

Just to name a few of the celebrities and successful people who belong to this generation, that's Google's founderSergey Brinn & Larry Page (born in 1973), Richard Stallman (founder of Free Software movement) as well movie and film producer celebrities such as Georgi Clooney, Lenny Kravitz, Quantin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, David Fincher etc.

According to United Kingdom survey study of 2500+ workers conducted by Workfront, GEN X are found to be among the hardest working employees in today's workforce. They are also ranked high by fellow workers for having a strong work ethics (about 59.5%), being helpful (55.4%) and very skilled (54.5%) of respondents as well marked as the best troubleshooters / problem solvers (41.6%) claimed so.
According to research conducted by Viacom, gen x they have a high desire for flexibility and fulfillment at work.

3. Generation Y (Millenials) – GEN Y

Following Generation X came on earth Genreation Y the birth period dated for this kids were years are stretchy year period that this generation is described are years 1980s – 1990s to yearly 2000s where birth period range of those ppl ends.
This kids are descendants of the GEN X and second wave Baby Boomers.
In the public this generation is referred as "echo boomers".

The Millenials characteristics are different based on the region of birth, they're famous for the increased familiarity with communication, media and digital technologies.

There upbringing was marked by increase in liberal approach to politics.
The Great recession crisis of the 2000s played a major impact on this generation because it has caused historical high levels of un-employment among youngsters and led to a possible long term economic and social damage to this generation.

Gen Y according are less brand loyal and the speed of the Internet has led the cohort to be similarly flexible and changing in its fashion, style consciousness and where
and how it is communicated with.

As I am born in 1983 me and my generation belongs to Generation Y and even though Bulgaria before 1991 was a Communist regime country, I should agree that I and many of my friends share a very similar behavior and way of thinking to the GEN Y stereotype described, but as I was born in a times of transition and Bulgaria as a Soviet Union Satellite at the time has been lacking behind in fashion and international culture due to the communist regime, me and my generation seem to be sharing a lot of common stereotype characteristics with Generation X such as the punk-rock, metal, hip-hop culture MTV culture and partly because of the GEN X like overall view on life.

Among most famous representative successful people of the Millenials generation are Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder), Prince William (the second in line to the British throne), Kim Jong Un (the leader dictator of North Korea) etc.

Following Millenials generation is GEN Z, demographers and researchers typically set as a starting birth date period of those generation 1990s and mid 2000s. As of time of writting there is still no clear consensus regarding ending birth years.

This is the so called Internet Generation because this generation used the internet and Smart Mobile Phone technology since a very young age, they are very confortable with technology (kinda of wired) and addicted to social media such as Facebook / Twitter / Instagram etc. Because of the level of digital communication, many people of this generation are more introvert oriented and often have problems expressing themselves freely in groups. Also they tend to lack the physical communication and more digitally community oriented, even though this depends much also on the specific personality and in some cases it is exactly the opposite.

* Summary

As a Marketer, Human Resources hiring personal specialist, a CEO or some kind of project / business manager it is a good idea to be aware of these 4 common stereotypes. However as this are stereotypes (and a theory) as everything theoritized the data is slighly biased and untrue. The marketer practice shows that whoever conducts a marketing and bases his sales on this theoritizing should consider this to be just one aspect of the marketing campaign those who are trying to sell, stuff ideas or ideology to any of those generation should be careful not to count 100% on the common traits found among the above 4 major groups and consider the individuality of person everyone has and just experiment a little bit to see what works and what doesn't.

Also it should be mentioned these diversification of stereotypes are mostly valid for the US citizens and Westerners but doesn't fully fit to ex-communist countries or countries of the Soviet union, those countries have a slightly different personality traits of person born in any of the year periods defined, same is more or less true for the poor parts of Africa and India, Vietnam, China and mostly all of the coomunist countries ex and current. It should be said that countries who belonged to the Soviet Union many of which are current Russian FederationRepublics have a personality traits that are often mixture of the 4 stereotypes and even have a lot of the traits that were typical for the WW I and WW II generations, which makes dealing with this people a very weird experience.

Nomatter the standard error that should always considered when basing a marketing research hypothesis on Generational Marketing (using generational segmentation in marketing best potential customer targets), having a general insight and taking in consideration those stereotypes could seriously help in both marketing as well as HR specific fields like Change Management.

Nomatter what just like all Theories, the theory of Boomers and the Generation segmantation is not completely true, but it gives a good soil for reasoning as well definitely helps for people involved in sociology and business.

Comments and feedback on the article are mostly welcome as the topic is very broad and there is much more to be said …

Nowdays communiacation between people in different generation is worsening exponentially and as a consequence of the digitalization the real (physical) contact between people is exponentially dropping and this is a fact everyone could realize.

Even in people and more Eastern or sunny countries where traditionally the direct contact has always been of a crucial importance is declining seriously, the social networks such as Facebok, Vkontakte (The Russian space Equivallent of Facebook) – if you have VK and want to add me there My profile there is here , Viber calls, WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat and all these are leading people into micro prisons narrowing their worldview up to the box (jail) each of this companies has created for people, just because you don't own the data you communicate over this channels and your data is being used for a severy complicated computerized researches on how you tend to think, how you tend to communicate, what are your triggering keywords and your general mental (mind) structures and cues. Privacy of all of these is also very low as many of this digital medias are designed with the malicious features to serve as a spy networks for end people. Not to mention often data collected about you is being sold to a third party agencies which collect all the time data about product preferences, buying behavior, life style etc.

People who refuse to become part of this electronic prisons built by Megalomaniacs (or Evil Geniuses as Richard Stallman uses to call them), just to name a few Mr. Zack Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (let him Rest in Peace), Elon Musk are being pushed into the Outside Zone., The more conservative and less exposed to technology older people or youngsters who value more their freedom and privacy, are slowly starting to being separated from the Digitalization and being looked upon like a little crazies who are psychologically sick.
In my opinion two major "camps", are being built, one of the people who doesn't have the skill or money to keep in track with latest technology advancements, these are usually people with lower education different thinking people, people with strong religious convictions, or burn out people who are overloaded by technology's chaotic ways as well as personalities trying to live as less dependent from society and social systems and are mindfully rejecting or limiting the technology use as much as they can.

The boom of Smart Mobile Phones (and the aggressive campaigns of Mobile operators for everyone to own some kind of Smart Phones be it Android, IPhone, BlackBerry etc.) and the imposed on society Digitalization of society by MultiCorporation companies is in my opinion, no doubt a planned process with a cleargoals that people's reality is being more and more controlled and spied on not to mention that it is fully possible to Program People to certain degrees by using computer technology, interfaces, Alarms.

Maybe not much of Citizens has thought over it or realize it but psychologists and peoples in roles within Medias long time are aware of the high role that Social Programming (Social Engineering) historically TV Channels, Radios and Nowadays Internet News / Medias play on disinforming the masses and let them believe an invented stories about wars, problems, famines that doesn't exist to keep them stuck in Fear through Fear Mongering (manipulation techniques). Moreover it is interesting fact that Programming of Human Mind through a slow repeatable processes has been a fact to certain degree and thus with Computers and Mobiles all of us are being programmed subconsciously to things we're not consciously aware (for more on that topic please see my previous article on Color Programming) as well as What is Predictive Programming of Mind (Society) and how it affect us ?

Not to mention the prooven fact that there are psychological mechanisms for making the mind to be addicted to things seen or experienced which are being adopted by Mostly all of large medias on the Internet.

The simplification of access to the Global Net (The Internet) and the unification of (I would say anti-social) web platforms such as Facebook, where mostly all with mid or upper education of people have registrations and are letting you without choice but either to live a lonely life of more or less rejection or join the "company". Those like me who nowadays are abstaining from Facebook and most of modern communication are being cut from the Digitalization slowly.

Through the last 10 – 15 years there has been a serious attempt from Free Software and Hackers to change the game into a more positive and more open frames of communication and give freedom to people with attempts for decentralization of social networks. Unfortunately it seems we're loosing the Game of Freedom at least in the normal nowadays Highly Filtered and more and more government agencies influenced (not to say controlled) Internet, here I'm excluding from the equation the recent attempts of Alternative thinking hackers (and unfortunately) criminals to build alternative internet spaces such as DarkNet / DeepWeb

As I like to experiment with Free Software in general to explore its business applicability, here is my short results on my experience and yearly research on what is there as a free software that gives you options to build a self hosted social network.

However with time the project StatusNet become GNU Social and my attempts to upgrade it following provided instructions with the GNU Social files were a failure, so I kept the old version of statusnet and abondoned it just to adopt BuddyPress as a way to keep track of my Personal Interests in organized self owned Twitter like service.

–"Fun & flexible software for online communities, teams, and groups."
This is the official description of the project my own efforts to establish it cost me at least 3 days up to a week just to establish something workable and a couple of more weeks to tailor it to my likings. I was planning to involve other people and build an online social community.
Most of available plugins for BuddyPress for extra-functionality are either old unmaintained or cost you good amount of moneys. I tried allowing Public Members registrations but soon the Network started filling with nasty spammer registrations. The available free plugins for Anti-Spam protection were real pain in the ass so finally I decided to keep the Network closed just to myself.
And create the user registrations manually after a primary email request contact from anyone who wants to own an account. As you could guess, as of time of writting this post, noone is contacting.
Considering SEO side of the network, even though I have around hundred posts with Videos, Music, Books, information and various Life Stuff of importance somehow Google, Yandex and Bing are indexing the pages (only about 350 pages are properly indexed). I tried to research why is that in Google Search console and Recrawl the site a couple of times, none of that didn't give me a very meaningful answers why BuddyPress Social network posted pages by my user are not ending up indexed properly in Search Engines and I don't have the full time to further investigate why is that, so anyone who is more advanced to Search Engine optimization (or better said have the time desite to help) me with this project is mostly welcome to contact me and we can collaborate and perhaps grow that network.

A highly customizable web framework and CMS for building social apps with PHP and MySQL. – however my personal experience with Elgg few years ago just shows, elgg is far from ready for a productive use, and anyone who want to start an Online Social Network has to seriously work with at least of small team of developers and system administrators and testers to make the thing good enough for daily use for the masses. There are some Elgg based social networks out there performing, however the project needs much more work until it is ready for an easy and mass use and anyone who is willing to build a custom social network needs to seriously invest a good amount of money for it to be tailored and maintained properly and the multitued of its bugs to be fixed.

4. Pligg

Is a a Free software social network designed from scratch with the help of many contributors to help you build up your website. This open source social network software can be used used and helps to lively setup communities, similar to Facebooks. Anyways for anyone who is willing to invest time and nerves, let him try and understand the project is still far from completeness.

Historically I tried to install Pligg as I was investigating on best options to build a free software based social network in 2015 but though I was aable to bring a workable version the spam problem still persisted and I brought down Pligg install in a couple of days because of its lack of enough functionality plugins and rapid development, as overall my personal experience was that Elgg was a much more grown product ready for use …

5. Oxwall

"Oxwall® is an open source mobile-friendly community website platform that is suitable for brand communities, interest-based social networks, and other online community projects."
Oxwall has been actively developed since 2010 after the team behind it developed plenty of community site projects.
Today Oxwall is a strong project with 3rd party development community.

It uses PHP and MySQL environment for social network development. It comes with a varied range of plugins that helps you personalize with add-ons to add functionality to the website. Its CMS is compatible with both small and large scale networking sites and even with executive websites.
I never personally tried Oxwall.

The development process is done by a small but dedicated team of 22 peoples which makes the project quite promising, but as the other options availabe for building an self hosted social network community, the project has still a long way to go …

Claiming to be the world's first open source social networking solution. Coded from scratch, it is highly efficient and very easy to use. As you can imagine its neither the first nor among the ones to easily build you workable solution, but for those who have intention to build something similar to facebook to the masses with the right Finances and Crowd Up raising or Business Angels eventually it can turn into something usuable with a lot of work and the right people

These free software (open source) based social networks are into a workable state, but because the enormous size of such projects and the fact that these projects are being done on a primary voluntееrs with almost little or none financial investitions the projects are moving slowly, have a lot of bugs, have a higher complexity to install and use by an ordinary uneducated people with little to less experience in the fields such as programming or system administration.

6. Mixxt is a social network design company, developing social extranets and intranets. It enables collaboration, communication, and Knowledge management through a single tool. It has a dedicated platform for fast development and enhancement. Develop your site with the help of custom designs, forums, wikis, and photos.

7. XOOPS

(XOOPS) is claiming or aiming to be "a classic tool for evolving from small to big community sites, intra-company web portals, and more. XOOPS has a modular format that can be extended as per needs. The web content management system helps in it. You may start with a blog and further augment it into a social networking website and with more functionality.
The module that is used to build a website with XOOPS is Yogurt. Environments used are MySQL, Linux, PHP, and Apache. But mainly MySQL and PHP are used. YouTube, friend list, pictures, communities, mp3 tracks, wall to post your messages are some of the features of XOOPS.".
Obviously even a little experiments with it shows, that the project has still a long way to go until it is usable enough without much tailoring for production use.

To sum it up, all of the 7 top free software social network projects gives a lot of options for free (if you have a network of dedicated developers with passion who are ready to commit work for free), mostly all of them offered a custom tailored packages with Themes and plugins sold for few hundred of dollars, for those who don't want to make things from scratch. But nomatter that developing a full featured ready to use solution, that is less buggy is amount of at least moderate to big investments.

If you happen to be a person who have an bright idea for the next competitor of Facebook at some time in future, you need to invest a lot and have to build an excellent company team and put the right amount of money / management effort to make the project succeed. However for a small and unpretencious social communities of up to few hundred of users (1000 to 100 000) users or so with the right scaling each of above projects could play well.

If you're interested just like me to build an alternative less-restricted more human rights respecting social network as an alternative to the already overcrowded commercial ones out there please get in contact with me, and perhaps we together can make a change for better!

Those interested in People Reading or holding a Management position position job inside some Small or Mid sized corporation could benefit greatly of a Book called
What Every Body is Saying

What Every Body is Saing is written by an ex-FBI Agent (JOE NAVANNO), probablythere are no actually ex-FBI agents, but that's a topic for another post.

The book is quick to read, especially if you follow the pictures of Body postures shown with their little description below.
Many of the Body Languages so commonly adopted by multitudes of people, thanks to the American of the Culture world-wide are being practiced
in some degree in mostly all people you might know (mostly unconsciously) …

What Every Body is Saying could be of a great help to people who want to make through in life and for Start-up company CEOs, Human Resource Managers, or anyone who want to better learn to communicate and Influence People.

Even in a normal family relations, being able to properly identify the Body Language of your Wife or kids would seriously benefit you and if you keep attention (focus) would reveal there short term-plans.

Adopting some of the suggested body languages in the book would definitely help you improve how people perceive you and practising some so called "Confident postures" could even boost your Confidence levels dramatically both when you're alone or when you are in a group of people or A Company Team Meeting.

Reading the Person Body language is of a great help also to understand the approximate Emotional / Spiritual state the person in front of you is and even if applied proparly could help you make the person or group of people be positively influenced to change from a negative to positive mindset
or when working on a project, could help you dramatically to make the people work more efficiently and boost their motivation / mood about the things, they have to someday do anyways.

The reader has to know of course that most of the mentioned body language cues are generalizations and in order to find out the exact messages being sent on non-verbal communication level depends on a multiple factors and many of the Body languages talked might be in a modified form and even some could be totally different from any of the described of the book.

However the observation practice (at least mine) shows that at least 60-70% of the described Body Language postures are adopted and used by mostly anyone out there.
To check the validity of the things described in the books just sit somewhere in a park or in a bar / caffeteria and watch carefully how people interact, you will be surprised how many things are being communicated non-verbally and how often the lack of one of the two, or two have severe communication issues, just because they couldn't synchronize their body language or lack the ability to read the other interlocutor's processed and communicated intentions.

The book when red at least for me was a wide eyes opener and even though as a Christian, I've always been doubting that any-generalization model trying to frame up people is very untrue and trying to influence people with your Body Language is bad sinful (kinda of satanic) practice, realizing that even Christians does communicate and do use body language (because they're conditioned by the society they lived in), that means that improving your Body Language to be more convincing in mostly anti-christian society we live can do you good favour to be adequate in society, or at least you can be aware of the existence of the Body Language and its meaning.

By the way, many of the models and gestures as translated described as a behaviour body interpretations are perhaps highly used nowadays by Agents across all the major Secret Services agencies such as CIA, MI6, KGB, Mussad etc.

This kind of things are learned in most business universities nowadays, but the way the Body Reading / Influencing knowledge is communicated in Business universities is a disaster, because it is usually compiled by Professors who alone are not expert or haven't been advanced enough in body language.
Thus even like that if you read the book, I'm sure you will benefit and perhaps reread it at least a couple of times in the coming years …

A summary of the book goes like this:

1. It starts with a short story on how the author get acquainted to the knowledge of body language and his personal life events

The author Joe Navarro was an emigrant from Cuba to US as the age of 8, because the author inability to speak English at all, his best way to understand what the other was saying or communicating in the first few years in US was to observe closely what the person in front was communicating non-verbally and makes guesses, what that could be.
His family and grandmother also played a key role to help him learn the craft of Body Language reaading.

Growing up and graduating college in the age of Baby Boomers, Joe Navarro was hired in FBI where he spend the following years as an agent specializing in Counter Intelligence
and behavior assessment.

2. It continues as the knowledge on Body interprations is being served in a very stuffed manner

The 3 key things to remember out of the book goes like that:

A. At least 60% of what you say is not coming out of your mouth.
B. There’s one more option next to fight or flight responce our brain does automatically
C. To become a master at reading body language, you have to develop situational awareness.

The book claims that people tend to be stuck into 3 main states (as a result of the evolutionary development of species (Creationists and Christian fundamentalists could argue seriously here 🙂 ) , whenever facing a difficult situation these are:

Freeze

Fight

Flight

To sum up if you're looking for new ways to improve your current relationships with people and build a new ones, the book would definitely help you tremendously.
I've found the book in a PDF format with few simple searches online so those who can't afford it could also download it from the internet (at least as of time of writting this article).
A lot of the exampled Body confidence / influence postures described in the book you will find on mostly any Kids Cartoon and Internet top shows and in mostly everybody from TED Talks show and mostly all Youtube educational videos and podcasterers.

I've been annoying for quite a long time by the the Clockwise moving backward and Forward Wheel (Ring) on Top of browser Tabs everytime I navigate to a new Internet domain or request a resource on the Net.

I'm aware that seeing the wheel all the time move back and forward is a very bad manipulation technique that is often used in advertisements in old movies and some advertisements in the start of the video . I'm talking about the infamous backward counting technique in a Circle (it was moer commonly used in the dawn of Television) aiming to induce watchers mind into hypnotic state …

Those who have a degree in psychology or have been into marketing or human resources fields or any field involved where you have to influence the masses are already aware of the backward counting methology which has been practiced heavily by hypnosis practisioners such as Sigmund Freud, to induce any kind of hypnotic state the hypnotist always asks the object of hypnotism to watch closely into a moving back and forwards clock, often accompanied by counting backwards …

Well my Theory here is that the same techniques is well aware of those who planned Windows OS in which if you remember the Sand Clock has been substituted in Windows 7 / 8 and Windows 10 with the rotating back and foward Wheel for the reason that this aims to influence people mind to go into Alpha state from Beta state and thus make them feel more relaxed while doing stuff on the PC.

One thing to mention here is Back and Forward wheel is not only into OS level it has been heavily adopted by leading Software as a Service (SAS) UIs such as Google's and probably more importantly Youtube (have you noticed the Cycling Wheel when waiting for a Youtube movie to Load), the Wheel is also heavily incoruprated in most if not all biggest Websites on the Net. Even If you have noticed these days Google's Cycling (Waiting) Wheel is not only Cycling but has the colorful programming incorporated.

Well probably many people who use computers daily did not really realize that the Computer OS and Programs GUI Interface they're using is influencing their mind and some famous psychological methodssuch as color programming and hypnotic tricks could be used more or less.

In that regard as a Firefox user I decided to change tne Back and Forward Wheel with another one which will not trigger my subconsciousness / mind all the time while browing on the Net into Alpha State. As I'm not a Firefox expert and my quick research on search Engines on how to achieve changing or removing the Browser Tabs all time turning wheel did not led me to nothing positive, I've consulted the experts in irc.freenode.net #firefox.

Now instead of the moving wheel you will get just a circle appearing as a static image while the page is loading.

If you want to absolutely remove any circles or images and show nothing when loading, e.g. not have any mean to monitor whether page is loaded or not, but also make it easier for the eye I even finally decided to completely remove the all time moving Wheel from Firefox Tabs even the static picture out using below CSS script with Stylish:

After all even after removing the FF Tabs wheel, there is the Status being printed down the webpage, showing text based the connection status. I find this kind of page loading status much less agressive and preferrable, than the current verions Firefox 4 onwards ..

One other thing I do to prevent the annoying Windows OS default Theme wheel is to change it to the old fashioned sand clock as well as bring back the theme of Windows 7 / 8 to Classic Theme of Win 2000, as I believe this reduced the level of zoombification the PC imposes on self 🙂

As a person involved in IT, i've been always irritated by how much inproductive is our society. Almost nothing in a modern world (no matter the Government Regime be it democratic or communistic is pushing you to become productive) on the contrary the modern culture preached habits are putting you into habits which are both unhealthy and make you live a very boring and unsuccessfuly life. There are plenty of books already written on the subject on how to be productice, however people are so busy to produce more and more and be materially successful, that most of the people we do is unwise and lacks any efficiency.
Below Infogram definitely gives a clue what is wrong with most people's regime which tend to produce less and less day by day, even though they put more and more effort in what they do.

Though I always thought I'm among the productice population, after revealing the inforgram I understand a lot of my mistakes which causing me to have often unhealthy and unefficient life …

If you have worked in a small or middle sized company and you're offered work into some of the top 100 world corporations, prepare yourself for some shocking 3 to 6 months depending on the company. This period in which you will be introduced to the company's field of business and way of work is called in corporate terms OnBoarding period. Even if everything looks to complicated and obscure, don't be quick to loose yourself or desperate as this is just a new beginning and as any new beginning it is hard. However once you're acquainted with basics it will be much easier for you.

After all most of the new things you will learn in Corporate Environment are just the good old ones you know already packaged under a different wrapper. You will be introduced to many portals, client names, have to watch a lot of "brain-dead" trainings, which told you basics on Corporation and its client essentials, be offered ways to advance, have to request Accounts and Credentials to servers via some obscure procedures, which change all the time, so it is likely the procedures you have to follow to get the necessery network / server accesses will be a procedure different from the one your colleagues followed few years ago, thus probably you will have to do account requests for a first time.In this on-boarding time you will deal with a lot of trainings teaching you to be ethical, respect your co-workers, learn basics of inter-cultural awareness and learn to get responsibility for your actions and some specific training regarding the job position (job description) you have.

You have to be patient and non-judgemental and ready to accept situation as it is and not be angry that so many people doesn't have idea on what is happening. Also it is a good start-up corporate advice to respect people's knowledge, don't thing that you're too knowledgable, as you will be amazed that there are a lot of people in huge companies which have better understanding and knowledge on tech than you. Also realize, the confusion that is taking place in Huge companies "The Right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing", as our CCL Kalin used to say. The corporate world is a world where way of work is very different from tiny companies, you will have a chain of managers on top of you. The huge companies world is a world of big fish players ..

It is normal that in the first weeks / months you feel overwhelmed because of too much information and all looks too difficult, however just don't worry and go on. Now all is hard but in a few months everything comes to place and you realize in reality all is easy and it just seems hard in the beginning.

It is a good thing that you use the "Induction" / Onboarding period of first few months to find to make as many contacts as possible as this will be of a great help in your later job time. Get in contact with people from Database / Database and Storage / Load Balancers / Networking / Firewall Teams / Managers / Delivery Leads – the rule here is the more, the better. If you want to grow in the company's scale making social contacts is even more important than being a hard-worker. If you have friends in management of company and you do your work well and try to be proactive, sooner or later your managers will notice this and will recommend you for some kind of manager position.

Here's few abbreviation meanings, you will have to learn if you will have to work some kind of system administration or support work for a Hewlett Packard.

Microsoft Products – For people coming from Linux / UNIX background, the induction (onboarding) period into a large corporation is even more complicated because if you have been accustomed to using Open Source OS and tools in large corporations you will probably have to do a lot of things with proprietary tools which are hard to run on Linux / *nix, therefore it is good practice if youintend to work for Biggest Organizations in the world to get used to either running a MS Windows 7 / 8 into a Virtualbox or VMWare or get used to using Windows as a Desktop environment. Once you enter the huge organization it is likely you're handed in with your working notebook, shipped with a Customized Windows install to work well with the corporation where you're onboarding. However companies like HP did a great job, because they offer Ubuntu / Debian / Scientific Linux distributions tailored with most tools you will need for normal daily work, so it is not necessery to use Windows (though I find it personally much easier) to use Windows as desktop nowadays.I really don't like running 20% of applications in Virtual Machines and doing occasional work-arounds to make things work. After all life is complex enough …

Microsoft Lync Communicator – This is the defacto standard program still used in corporation for internal VoIP / Video communication , One of coolest Lync feature is Sharing Screen. At any time you can share your screen (thing like you have installed teamviewer), give-control to remote party, you can share screen between multiple people and it is pretty much like a shared desktop conference, really useful! However sometimes when Internet is slow or network is failing occasionally MS Lync gives worse results than TeamViewer, so having TeamViewer just in case is useful too. Lync works making the VoIP connection by using some Exchange Mail server integration.

MS (Outlook) Calendar – Calendar is one of the top things you have to know to organize meetings with clients and colleagues to discuss various project aspects, server problems or just ask a question your Solution Designer regarding some server Environment designed by him .

MS Outlook – All mail communication is primary using Outlook Express, you can add Tasks, Contacts and set Calendar meetings with it. If you're like me and coming from UNIX world and get used too much to Mozilla Thunderbird, you will be in big shock until you get used to work with Outlook, not that it is difficult but it is quite different from Thunderbird. For efficient work with Outlook Mail you will have to learn creating Outlook Filters and Outlook Mail backups as often mailbox is just 1 or2G and mailbox fills in for a year time.

Monitoring Software IBM Netcool or something a like – Servers and services will be monitored with some kind of tool whose basics you will have to learn, if you have worked with Monit / Nagios or Munin you will quickly grasp the basic concept

MS Office / MS Project – You need Word and Excel quite often and for sysadmins this is very irritating. All office and client documents will be exchanged in Word and Excel format, if you're a Project Manager you will need heavily use of Microsoft Project too which needs to be installed additionally as it does not ship by default with most MS Office / Windows installs.

MS OneNote – is a software like notepad supporting tabs and allowing to make notes which are stored to a SharePoint

SharePoint (SP) – in large companies they like placing things into Sharepoints so a lot of the documentation is found on some random sharepoints (this is like a Directory Listing Apache server) – very annoying as it is really chaotic – I don't like it.

CMO – Chief Marketing Officer

CMO – Current Mode of Operations

FMO – Future Mode of Operations

SMO – Separation Management Office / Separation Management Officer

WFH – Work From Home, mail header message aiming to report someone is going to work from his home during the day

CFO – Chief Financial Officer

CEO – Chief Execute Officer

PM – Project Manager

FCR – Firewall Change Request (Any new or old firewall rule nr. which has to be created / modified / deleted)

RTPA – Ready to Production

ORT – Operational Readiness Test (some basic tests to be made and documented), before a server is handed in to RTPA

HPSM – HP Service Manager (a ticket / change web desktop frontend)

Change – a ticket like ID and system which has to be used necessery to describe any server config / file / service modification

Ticket – A support ticket oped in case of some emergency with some server service happens

CI = Configuration Item
Instance – Any service that is running more than once on a server lets (say 2 MySQL and 2 Apache servers) running on same server on different port numbers will be 4 instances

LB = Load Balancer (Load Balancers include capabilities of Intelligent Switches are in essence routers which can balance load ovr number of hosts running different services in order to ensure traffic received to a service is balanced between members of a cluster most often they're Active and Standby. Different methods to load balance traffic exist round-robin etc., traffic to Apache / MySQL / PostgreSQL and virtually any service could be load balanced.

SD – Solution Design / Solution Designer (The person preparing the graphics and documentation for how a combination of servers environment will be operating)

SLA = Service Level Agreement (Agreement document between Company Corporation and End customer about services / servers or any work to be provided under what conditions and cost and time interval. In short SLA is a contract document between Corporation and customer.

Service Window – Mon – Fri 08:00 – 17:00 (The time in which server is on active support and will has to be repaired by a support team promptly if emergency occurs)

TOP Process – Turn to Production (The processes which PM follows, before project turns to production TTP).

Top Approver – The list of people involved in project which has to approve the Top process until set as completed.

DL / CCL – Delivery Lead / Collaboration Capability Lead / Client

Capability Lead – This is a job position one step behind a Team Manager. DL's goals are to help teams manage internal issues and deal with clients requests, next to doing some minor technical job. In short this position is like a Junior Manager (or a position which is held before), people emerge to Team Managers.

TDL – Technical Delivery Lead

Prod or just P env – Production environment (if many servers) or P server if it is single one

UAT (User Acceptance Testing) / Test server, env – UAT is the last phase of software testing process.
During UAT, actual software users test the software to make sure it can handle required tasks in real-world scenarios, according to specifications. UAT is also known as beta testing
Test server usually same configuration as Prod whose purpose is to test new releases before deployed to Prod environment

DNS Internal / External record – (Whether DNS is seen only in a client local network (from Internal DNS only) – its called Internal record, External record is when a hostname is resolved from all the Internet)

Security Class – The levels of security of access to a server (Different countries and Unions legislation world-wide require different rules and regulations on server security).
Examples of Server security classes are: White, Grey, Black (servers). For example according to EU legislation Black servers
can only be administrated / managed by people originating from
same country as where server is physically located.

Digital Key / (Digital Certificate) / Active Identity – This is a Flash drive USB (storage) with installed digital certificate which is used to authenticate you to internel corporate network

PC COE – PC COE – is a set of services and tools that has helped HP reduce its desktop computing costs by $200 million per year. HP also establishes a new organization within the HP OpenView division to market TCO solutions. From PC-COE you can install almost all proprietary software for free and use them for your daily work. The software comes with free Licensing for internal HP Use.

Citrix Receiver – Citrix Receiver is the easy-to-install client software that provides access to your XenDesktop and XenApp installations. With this free download you can access applications, desktops and data easily and securely from any device, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and Macs

Above terminology is specific to HP however, most of the terminology and procedures during onboarding time (period) should be very similar or even the same for other of the Top 100 Largest Companies by Revenue such as:

I was working on a Application Migration Project whose goal was to Install a business application called Asset Guardian and then move current company Data from the old server to the new AppServer.
For that purpose the company vendor Asset Guardian shipped to a Public access FTP, a huge (12GB) ZIP archive file which had to be transferred into a well secured DMZ-ed corporation network with various implemented Traffic Shaping Network policies, a resctrictive firewall allowing access to Internal Network only and to Few (Restrictive configured) Proxy Server IPs on port 80 and 8080.

One of the proxy servers allowed access to the Internet and I set this one and tried downloading the Huge Archive file with the Windows 2012 server default browser Internet Explorer 10, though the download started it kept slow between ~ 300 – 500KB sec and when reached 3.4GB download failed. I tried resuming the download but as the remote Public FTP server where files resides doesn't support FTP RESUME function.
I thought it might be that Internet Explorer is badly managing the download so, I go forward and installed Portable Firefox(mirrored version 33.1.1 is here). Re-running download with firefox also failed, so the next logical step was for me to try downloading with Windows version ofWget (Wget) and with Portable Free Download Manager 3.9.14.1481 (mirrored here) using both of them was unable to complete download (probably due to firewall or Proxy screwing the proxy inspected traffic) thus I had to look for another way to copy the enormous archive into the company network.

To get around the issue I tried to download the file from FTP to another Server running Apache and tried re-downloading the big file archive (Asset-Guardian-data.zip) from Apache Webserver via HTTP protocol, this download method didn't work neither using plain HTTP protocol for download when downloaded file reached (3.4GB), thus I realized this is due to restrictive Proxy servers (dropping file downloads) bigger than 3.4GBs).

Then to be able to transfer the huge 12GB file, it seems the only left option was to to chop the big file on smaller file chunks and transfer them one by one.
In my case I had the Asset-Guardian-Files.zip transferred already to the Apache (Webserver) host which is running Linux so basicly the task was to Transfer Big archive file between the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 and Windows 2012 Server.

Quickesy way to do that is by using UNIX split command, i.e.:

split -b 1024m Asset-Guardian-Files.zip

The outputted files each 1GB are with naming (xaa, xab, xac, xad, xae, xaf, gaf etc.) in same folder where split command is run:

To later merge the files on the Windows 2012 server (copy) command is used:

This method to chop and transfer the file is most simple one and it doesn't require the two servers to have WinRAR or Console RAR / unrar installed.

If instead of Copy Huge File from Linux -> Windows host you need to copy too big file (lets say 100GB) between 2 Windows servers (Windows server host A and Windows server Host B – both situated in different firewall corporate networks) you will need to download to Win Host A and use Windows UNIX split equivalent tool called sfk (The Swiss File Knife) , sfk has port also for Mac OS so in case of need for need for migrating huge archive file from Mac OS X host it will serve as Linux's split – I've made SFK (current version) mirror here.

Another way to cut the 12GB file in parts and transfer to destination host via HTTP was to use rar (on the Linux host), then download the file on Win 2012 server and use Winrar Portable Free to extract the multiple files:

To make archive separate in parts set out to certain size out of a huge file with rar on Linux use:

I was stunned today to find out my countryland Bulgaria is 2nd in Europe and 5th in the world in terms of most attractive outsourcing destination according to BTA (Bulgarian News Agency).
Bulgaria is ordering 5th after, India, Indonesia, Estonia and Singapore. The ranking of most attractive destination is based on factors;

All this opens a big opportunity for economy development and inflush of fresh-money from outsourced jobs. Due to higher and European standard level of education in Bulgaria, the workhand pool in Bulgaria is usually more knowledgeable and better in quality if compared to rest of 3rd world countries India, Indonesia, Sinagopore etc. Bulgaria has generally good infrastructure and offers easy transportation of people and resources, something not so well developed yet in lets say India or Indonesia. Therefore opportunities for further development in Bulgaria as a leading outsource center in Europe are immerse in the coming 10 years. So far big companies who already realized the great Bulgaria potential like Comverse, HP, IBM etc. started actively hire people in Bulgaria and outsource their businesses but this mainly happens in Sofia.

The trend in long run however is that European leading companies start outsource in smaller cities and towns as well. Right now most prepared personal ready for outsourcing in Bulgaria is in field of Information Technologies, Electronics, Marketing, Transportation Equipment, Business Management, Chemical Industry, Food & Bevarage and Logistics. General outsourcing trend is more and more people working in not high qualitified labor to enter the market of out-sourcing. There are plenty of companies already in Bulgaria involved in textile (clothes) industry offering their cheap and high quality workhand to large external multinational companies like Zara, H & M , Versace etc.

Currently Bulgaria is considered the poorest countries in the European Union with the shocking minimal wage of 310 leva about (155 EUR) and avarage monthly sallary of 812 leva (406 EUR) monthly. The cheapness of Bulgaria is still unidentified gold field ignored by many Western Multinational companies. Outsourcing in Bulgaria has great advantages for European Countries based companies in terms of product logistics as product transportation cost and taxation within the European Union are very cheap if compared to rest of top non-EU outsourcing countries. Due to Ð¾bviously advantegous conditions in Bulgaria there are plenty of companies in Bulgaria already specialised in auditing outsourcing business risks and planning steps a company could partake to outsource its business in BG. Current Bulgarian government is making further attempts to relieve country's conditions to attract new business investors by 'Simplifying country's business registration and operations administration requirements and fostering better business environment' as said recently by second minister of economicsKrasin Dimitrov in recent business forum "Opportunities and Challanges in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Shared Service Centers (SSC) in Bulgaria"

As part of my assigned training in Hewlett Packard today in the field of Cross Cultural Communication, I've learned that according to modern research on different cultures. Nations and people belonging to them can be grouped generally in 2 major groups people / nations with Low Contextual Culture and people with High Contextual Culture. Its quite interesting to know this concept as it can explain plenty of clashes between civilizations and why some people from certain nation gets obsessed with Chineese, Japanese and generally Asian Cultures, where some gets obsessed with Western / American Culture – Civilization. This concepts catched my attention and I decided to blog on that because I myself hold deep interest in Anthropology and this concepts can give some scientific explanation on why certain people belonging to a nation behave the way they do? Dual Conceptual Culture concept idea was introduced by antrophologist Edward T. Hall in a book Beyond Culture dating from year 1976. What this theory stands for is that nation cultures can be divided by two general groups. One that are more definitive and express themselves right to the point being descriptive and direct where verbal communication mostly matters – (Low Conceptual Cultures) and 2. Cultures which are more easy going not so strict with a lot of non-verbal communication (so called kind cultuers) – where things like pride, dignity and respect are much higher than in Low Conceptual Cultuers. Where this two cultures has to communicate / negotiate often as a consequence for a difference big culture problems occurs thus it is useful that one is aware of existence of both types of culture and having to communicate with International people (especially in Field of International Business deals), one keeps always in mind to try to communicate in Low or High contextual cultures waves based on people with whom communicating.

Its interesting word emphasis and "deepness" meaning differs between two, in High Contextual Cultures more can be said by less words, where in Low Contextual Cultures words said meaning is not so strong and communication is much more casual just like for instance in (American Movies). Of course cultures exist which are mixture of Lower and High Contextuality and with modern life globalization the merit between two starts to disappear and well known High Contextual Cultures like Asians start to become more Low Contextual, where Low Conceptual ones like Americans start to become more High Conceptual as result of encountering High Conceptual ones. However in general because the fact that Western World Cultures still are richer and more business developed, the influence fo Low Contextual ones to Higher Contextual ones is higher than the other way around. Of course both concepts strongly can vary on various individuals part of certain nations, where some Asians might be more Higher Contextual influenced as a result with encountering and interested more in Western Civilization and on other hand Western People can be more influenced by Asian Cultures for their internal set to be more Asian by nature (I myself am a good example for that).

It is typical that Higher Conceptual Cultures by nature are more relational, collectivist, intuitive, and contemplative, where Low Conceptual ones are more individualistic and logic driven.

Its interesting fact that High Contextual Culture is more to be seen in cultures with less ratial diversity. Cultures more rich in tradition and history are also usually more Higher Contextual Cultures.

Lower and Higher Culture is highly used in modern marketing and thus are must have skills for anyone who wants to enter International Business field. According to modern business theories there is connection between Low / High Contextual Cultures and fields of expertise. In my view according to Contextual 2 types Spirituality in general is filling up more into cultures with High Contextual Cultures than in Low. Knowing and identifying type of Contextual Culture of person is very helpful for example when you have to give presentation in audiences in countries around the world. Identifying the audience can help you to present in a way so audience is not offended by presentation. There is plenty of real life examples where knowing of Low and High Contextual Culture existence gives you big advantage if you work for some big company like IBM, Hewlett Packard or Comverse in multi-national environment knowing your colleagues culture is vital to build good colleague relations and work succesfully in teams.

I haven't blogged for a while for a plenty of reasons, I'm going through a change period in my life and as any change it is not easy.
This post will be not informative and will not teach any of my dear readers, anything on Computers its pretty personal but still for my friends it might cause interest.
Here is my personal life story over the last few months …

For a while I worked in a International University College situated in my hometown Dobrich. I was hired on position of IT Manager, and actually was doing a bit of E-Marketing to try to boost traffic to College's website – www.vumk.eu and mostly helping the old school hacker ad college system administrator over the last 10 yrs – Ertan to fix a bunch of Linux Mail / SQL and Webservers and some Windows machines. In college I learned from Ertan how to install and backups of restaurants software called BARBEQUE as well as how to fix problems with billing terminals situated in College Restaurant (3rd floor of building). Other of my work time I had to fix infested Windows computers with viruses re-install Windowses and fix various printing and network problems of College's teachers, accountants, cash desk, marketing and rest of college employees.

Talking about Ertan I should express my sincere tremendous Thanks (Thanks Ertan) to it for recommending me for this job position. Right before I started work in the college I was jobless for a while starting to get desperate that its impossible find work. Current IUC sysadmin – Mr. Ertan Geldiev is a remarkable man and one of the people that made great impression in my mind. Something I found interesting I can learn from Ertan was to get from his cheerful "admin" attitude. As a true hacker Ertan had this hacker attitude of playfulness I myself has for a while lost over the years. So seeing someone like this near my life make me a good favor and had a positive influence on myself.

I have learned a lot from Ertan during the 3 months and 3 days in International University College. Just for a bit of historic information earlier IUC was known as International College – Albena, also among Dobrich citizens known as The Dutch College – as earlier IUC had good relations with Dutch Universities and was issuing double degrees both Bulgarian and Dutch. Nowadays I'm not sure if still Double-degrees partnership between IUC and Dutch Universities exist, what I know for sure is college is issuing European Double Degrees in partnership with Cardiff Metropolitan University. I myself have earlier studied in the college and already know the place well thus will use this post to say a few words on my impressions on it …

The college is a great place to be as you have chance to meet plenty of people both lecturers (professors), participate in the various events organized by College's as well as get involved in the many European Projects which are being handled by a European Projects department special department situated on the back of the College Building. Other positive about College is it is small and located on a peaceful town of Dobrich. This gives the bright people a lot of space for personal development, anyways on the other hand it can make you also a bad as Dobrich as a small city is a bit boring. The studies in College are good for students who want personal freedom as there is not too strict requirements for professors on how to teach.

Though college had help me grow, especially in my knowledge in Windows 7 and 8 (Ertan had a really good Windows background), I couldn't have the chance to develop myself too further in the long term. So my job offer to work in HP as Web and Middleware Implementation Engineer opened much broader opportunities for my long term IT career. Other reason I quit the College IT job was simply because I needed more money I had the vision to make a family with a girl from Belarus – Svetlana and in order to take care for her I need to earn good money. My official salary in the college was the funny for the position – 640 lv (though after a few months I was promised to have a raise and earn 400 EUR :)) . Such low sallary was for the reason I had the idea to continue studying in College and complete my Bachelor Business degree and we had agreed with the College CEO Mr. Todor Radev to extract part of my salary monthly and with that to pay my 1 semester tuition fee (2200 EUR) – necessary for my graduation assignment. Though completing the Bachelor is important phase to close in my life for a long time, I found for the moment more valuable to work for HP and earn normal living salary with which to possibly finance myself and create family with woman of my life (hopefully) in the short term.

In this post I want express my sincere thanks to all people in International College (Elena Urchenko, Krasimir – for helping me in my job duties), Pavel and Silvia for being a colleague for a while I worked partly in the Marketing Department.

Talking about Marketing Department what I did there is some Twitter Marketing (building some twitter followers) and wrote a tiny document with recommendation on how to optimize College website – vumk.eu (future version) – for better SEO ranking. This included complete analysis from user outlook to Indexing bots and site current code.

I have to do a big underline on how great person the College President and UNI Rector – Docent Todor Radev is. I have already bitter experience studying for a while in a government universities when younger and I know from experience usually Rectors and Universities management of state universities is pure "Hell". Thanks to Mr. Todor Radev for he did me a big favor letting me quit job just a week later (instead of 1 month as it is officially set by Bulgarian Dismissal Law and explicitly stated in my Work Contract. Also as a person my experience from Docent Radev is wonderful too. He is extremely intelligent, brilliant gentleman and most importantly open minded and always open for innovation.

As a close up I would like to say Big Thanks to everyone which I worked with or met in International University College! Thanks guys for all your support and help, thanks for being work mates and friends for the time.